My nights are blessed with sweetest sleep; My friends are neither false nor cold; And yet, of late, I often sigh: 'I'm growing old.'"

I feel no symptoms of decay,

I have no cause to mourn or weep;

thousand miles from land are we,
Tossing about on the stormy sea,
From billow to bounding billow
cast,

Like fleecy snow on the stormy
blast.

The sails are scattered abroad like
weeds;

The strong masts shake like quivering reeds;
The mighty cables and iron chains,

The hull, which all earthly strength dis-
dains,

A home, if such a place may be
For her who lives on the wide, wide sea,
On the craggy ice, in the frozen air,
And only seeketh her rocky lair

To warm her young and to teach them to
spring

At once o'er the waves on their stormy

wing,

O'er the deep! o'er the deep!

Where the whale and the shark and the sword-fish sleep

They strain and they crack; and hearts like Outflying the blast and the driving rain,

stone

Their natural, hard, proud strength disown.

Up and down! up and down!

From the base of the wave to the billow's

crown,

And amidst the flashing and feathery foam
The stormy petrel finds a home,

The petrel telleth her tale-in vain;
For the mariner curseth the warning bird
Who bringeth him news of the storm un-

heard!

Ah! thus does the prophet of good or ill
Meet hate from the creatures he serveth still;
Yet he ne'er falters,-so, petrel, spring
Once more o'er the waves on thy stormy wing.

T

GEORGE W. CURTIS.

HE leaders of our Revolution were men of whom the simple truth is the highest praise. Of every condition in life, they were singularly sagacious, sober, and thoughtful. Lord Chatham spoke only the truth when he said to Franklin, of the men who composed the first colonial Congress: "The Congress is the most honorable assembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times." Given to grave reflection, they were neither dreamers nor visionaries, and they were much too earnest to be rhetoricians. It is a curious fact, that they were generally men of so calm a temper that they lived to extreme age. With the exception of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, they were most of them profound scholars, and studied the history of mankind that they might know men. They were so familiar with the lives and thoughts of the wisest and best minds of the past that a classic aroma hangs about their writings and their speech; and they were profoundly convinced of what statesmen always know, and the adroitest mere politicians never perceive,—that ideas are the life of a people; that the conscience, not the pocket, is the real citadel of a nation; and that when you have debauched and demoralized that conscience by teaching that there are no natural rights, and that therefore there is no moral right or wrong in political action, you have poisoned the wells and rotted the crops in the ground.

The three greatest living statesmen of England knew this also. Edmund Burke knew it, and Charles James Fox, and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. But they did not speak for the King, or Parliament, or the English nation. Lord Gower spoke for them when he said in Parliament: "Let the Americans talk about their natural and divine rights; their rights as men and citizens; their rights from God and nature! I am for enforcing these measures." My lord was contemptuous, and the King hired the Hessians, but the truth remained true. The Fathers saw the scarlet soldiers swarming over the sea, but more steadily they saw that national progress had been secure only in the degree that the political system had conformed to natural justice. They knew the coming wreck of property and trade, but they knew more surely that Rome was never so rich as when she was dying, and, on the other hand, the Netherlands, never so powerful as when they were poorest. Farther away they read the names of Assyria, Greece, Egypt. They had art, opulence, splendor. Corn enough grew in the valley of the Nile. The Syrian sword was as sharp as any. They were merchant princes, and the clouds in the sky were rivaled by their sails upon the sea. They were soldiers, and their frown frightened the world.

"Soul, take thine ease," those empires said, languid with excess of luxury and life. Yes: but you remember the king who had built his grandest palace, and was to occupy it upon the morrow; but when the morrow came the palace was a pile of ruins. "Woe is me!" cried the King, "who is guilty of this crime?" "There is no crime," replied the sage at his side; "but the mortar was made of sand and water only, and the builders forgot to put in the lime." So fell the old empires, because the governors forgot to put justice into their governments.